About the program
The Worldview Journey is a research-based, transformative learning program developed by Worldview Journeys in collaboration with Utrecht University. It is grounded in a validated seven-step learning cycle, informed by transformative learning theory, and has been tested with thousands of participants across diverse contexts — from higher education to open online programs.
Unlike programs that focus on delivering new ideas or knowledge, the Worldview Journey works at a deeper level, creating the conditions under which participants can examine their own meaning-making, engage genuinely across difference, broaden their worldviews, and live in greater alignment with their values.
It combines what most programs offer separately: potent conceptual knowledge (a worldview lens that makes the world newly legible), experiential learning (a worldview test, a worldview interview, guided nature walk, peer coaching), introspective practices (journaling, reflection), and meaningful human encounters through deep dialogue.
Course summary
Worldviews as deep leverage points for systemic change
Humanity faces an unprecedented poly-crisis - a convergence of ecological breakdown, democratic decay, intense polarization, and a pervasive crisis of meaning, amongst others. Voices across diverse fields argue that addressing these interlocking challenges requires nothing less than a shift in the worldviews, mindsets, and paradigms from which our current systems arise. As Donella Meadows argued, this is our deepest leverage point for systemic change.
Yet, as she also noted, the deeper the leverage point, the harder to engage it and the more resistance it tends to create. On top of that, we now live in a worldview-plural world. Every day, we encounter people who make sense of reality in radically different ways. They operate from other worldviews, departing from different assumptions about what is true, what matters, and what needs to change.
In a world where the old stories no longer hold and new ones have not yet emerged, our late postmodern society is also characterized by a pervasive sense of moral and existential disorientation, sometimes referred to as the ‘meaning crisis’. This crisis arguably underlies the resurgence of traditionalism and populism, while also pointing to a palpable need for deeper sense-making.All of this underscores the need for genuine engagement with our worldviews. Yet most of us have never been supported to develop the capacities for this: the ability to see our own worldview, to constructively engage with perspectives different from our own, to expand our views and embrace a more planetary perspective, and to bring alignment between what we believe and how we live.
This program sets out to do precisely that, developing 'deep worldview literacy'. We do this through a combination of powerful knowledge, personal reflection, experiential activities, and deep dialogues. The program reaches into the personal domain, inviting us to explore, exchange, expand, and express our own worldviews — as we believe we cannot ask others to change while leaving ourselves unchanged. In this vision, the inner work of deep worldview literacy is itself a form of changemaking; one that starts from the inside out.
Learning objectives
The Worldview Journey is for anyone who wants to develop the capacities to navigate difference, complexity, and collective challenge more skillfully - and who senses that this requires not just new information, but also inner exploration and change. The program is particularly suited to:
Sustainability and regeneration practitioners who work across cultural, ideological, or disciplinary divides and want to be able to engage with and mobilize diverse worldview-audiences.
Educators, facilitators, and community leaders who want to support genuine dialogue and perspective-taking in their work, rather than surface-level exchange.
Changemakers and activists who recognize that the inner and outer dimensions of transformation are inseparable — and that we’re the vessels for the change we’re inviting others into.
Anyone feeling overwhelmed, disheartened, or disoriented by the state of the world, or just curious about their own worldview and the big life questions, while looking for a grounded way to engage.
No prior knowledge of worldview theory is required. This course is self-contained and open to all.
Course structure
01
Journey 1
Explore Your Worldview: Gain perspective on your perspective From unconscious to reflexive
For most of us, our worldview is like water to fish — so omnipresent and fundamental to our experience that it becomes invisible. We don't see our worldview; we see with it. It shapes what appears real, what seems valuable, what feels possible — without our noticing. This first journey is about gaining perspective on your perspective, while also recognizing the larger landscape of worldviews present in contemporary society.
Through the worldview test (a research-based tool), short video lectures, guided reflection, and several deep dialogues exploring your own worldview, you begin to recognize the lens you look through — and to see how it shapes what you notice, what you're open to, and what you dismiss. This is the foundational shift: from being embedded in your worldview to being able to look at it.
"As the weeks went by the different worldviews became more concrete and tangible for me. I started 'seeing' them in action around me and in myself."
“The fundamental shift that the program repeatedly helped to initiate: from ‘seeing with a worldview unconsciously’ to ‘seeing with a worldview reflectively.”